Subject: Re: use of share vs lib
To: Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
From: David Brownlee <abs@anim.dreamworks.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 07/31/1998 16:30:12
On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Tim Rightnour wrote:
> On 31-Jul-98 Perry E. Metzger spoke unto us all:
> # Tim Rightnour writes:
> # > I've been compiling a ton of games lately (if you haven't noticed) and have
> # > been placing scorfiles and datafiles in $(X11BASE)/share. However, it
> # > occurs
> # > to me that a few older pkgs, and some other non-game stuff is using lib.
> #
> # I won't express an opinion on data files, but score files belong in
> # /var.
>
> Are we sure we want to pollute var like that?
>
The games that ship with NetBSD already use /var for their
highscores, so its not _too_ much additional pollution :)
One 'nice' thing I noticed with the default DEC config on the
sharks was running /var from an mfs, extracted from a
tarfile in /etc. Not to everyone's taste, but possibly something
we could keep in mind when making changes to /var...
> Another issue here might be complexity.. It can be done.. don't get me wrong..
> but now we have to do things like patch programs that have a generic DATA_DIR
> cpp define and make them all use our own SCORE_DIR define. I suppose having
> them in /var isn't so terrible.. though it does make scorefiles unshareable
> across machines.. and now you would have to manually touch /var files in order
> to run the game from NFS..
Hmm.. game scorefiles seem to be a special case - we do not have
anthing else which is 'writable and sharable between machines'.
One option is $PREFIX/var (to keep everything inside /usr/pkg
where possible), and let people who want games _and_ readonly
shared $PREFIX make that a symlink to somewhere else...
As long as its documented is should be fine...
David/absolute
"You think you're God's gift to the opposite sex"
"Maybe... if you believe in a malevolent God."